Energy use rises
Taiwan’s energy use rose for a fourth month in December after factories boosted production to meet overseas orders.
Consumption of coal, petroleum, gas, thermal energy and electricity advanced 19 percent from a year earlier to the equivalent of 10 million kiloliters of oil, or about 2 million barrels a day, the Bureau of Energy said in an e-mailed report yesterday. Energy demand fell 2.3 percent last year.
Power consumption rose 14 percent to 18.7 billion kilowatt-hours in December, with demand from industrial companies gaining 28 percent from a year earlier.
Taiwan’s use of natural gas increased 8.5 percent to 139.1 million cubic meters, while coal consumption climbed 15 percent to 5.28 million tonnes.
Use of petroleum products rose 23 percent from a year earlier to the equivalent of 4.46 million kiloliters of oil in December, the energy bureau said.
Forex reserves at US$350.7bn
The nation’s foreign exchange reserves recorded US$350.7 billion at the end of last month, up US$2.51 million from December, the central bank said yesterday.
Lin Sun-yuan (林孫源), director-general of the central bank’s department of foreign exchange, attributed the growth to an increase in investment earnings. As of Dec. 31, Taiwan remained the world’s No. 4 in terms of the amount of foreign exchange reserves, tailing China, Japan and Russia, he said.
China’s foreign exchange reserves totaled US$2.39 trillion at the end of December, up US$126.6 billion from last September while Japan declined US$21.8 billion to US$996.6 billion from November. Russia saw a month-to-month increase of US$3.3 billion to reach US$395.6 billion in December.
Compal targets Acer
Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), the world’s largest maker of notebook computers by shipments, said it aims to get more than half of the contract-manufacturing orders for Acer Inc (宏碁) laptops this year.
“That’s our internal goal, I think we can achieve it,” Chang Chih-ming (張志銘), head of investor relations at Taipei-based Compal, said by telephone yesterday.
Compal had between 40 percent and 45 percent of Acer’s laptop orders last year, he said.
DBS focuses on Asia
Southeast Asia’s biggest bank, DBS Group Holdings, will focus on its Asian business in the next five to 10 years to tap the region’s growing affluence, the group’s new chief executive said yesterday.
Besides the domestic market, the bank intends to expand its footprint in the greater China region and in South Asia, Piyush Gupta said, in his first news conference since joining the bank in November.
In five years’ time DBS hopes to earn 40 percent of its revenues from Singapore, 30 percent from the greater China region, with the remaining 30 percent from South Asia and Southeast Asia, the bank said.
Currently, the bank earns slightly more than 60 percent of its income from Singapore and close to 30 percent from greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Chinese surplus falls
China’s current account surplus, a key gauge of a nation’s foreign trade, fell last year for the first time in eight years, official data showed yesterday, as the global crisis hit exporters last year.
China booked a current account surplus of US$284.1 billion last year, down 35 percent from 2008, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange said in a statement on its Web site.
It was the first time since 2001 that China’s surplus declined, Xinhua news agency reported.
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